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Dazai sits on the ice cold floor of his room (... Can you even call a shipping container a room? He’s had this debate with Chuuya countless times and still doesn’t have a definitive answer), knees hugged to his chest and arms wrapping around himself. He would try and stop the violent shivering of his body, but it’s the only thing keeping him grounded right now. The only thing he can feel. He can’t even feel Odasaku’s blood on his hands anymore. Granted it dried quite a bit ago thanks to the almost freezing temperatures he had to walk in to get to where he is right now. But even then, he’s still usually able to feel blood on his hands or face even when it’s dried.
The hands and face, they’re the only parts of his body he leaves exposed. Leaving his hands exposed is for practical reasons obviously. It’s pretty difficult to be crafty with stupid thick material interfering with your sleight of hand tricks (No wonder Chuuya is so bad at that stuff. He’d tell the little guy to stop wearing those hideous things, but he knows they have meaning to him. They help him. And Chuuya never tells Dazai to get rid of his bandages, so who is he to try and order Chuuya to ditch his gloves?). On the other hand (His hands both look the same now. Red. How is he supposed to tell the difference?), the reasoning behind leaving his face exposed, minus his right eye– well, actually, that’s being exposed for the first time in years as he sits here spiraling, but he’s not gonna think about that metaphor–, is more complex and psychoanalytically promising. He likes the people he tortures or kills to see his facial expressions (Or sometimes lack thereof. That can really freak out the right kinds of people). For them to see that he couldn’t care about what he’s doing if he tried. To show them that there is no hope for them to walk away unharmed by trying to manipulate and coax out his inhibition. Because he has none. But it’s not that he finds pleasure in doing what he does, so to speak. He doesn’t really feel anything.
For years he considered the two the same, pleasure and nothingness. He’d only feel strongly enough to be able to identify his emotions when bad things happened. When good things happened, or he did something good (A miracle, really), he didn’t feel anything. But nothing felt better than dread and hopelessness and terror or whatever other negative emotion could theoretically apply at the time. So he assumed that was what happiness felt like. That was pleasure. Because happiness and sadness are supposed to be opposites (Well, he knows that to not be true now, but for the sake of explaining his feelings, he’ll humor the myth). Existence and nothingness are opposites, so he assumed the nothing he felt had to be the opposite of negative: positive. He does a lot of assuming when it comes to this stuff, actually. He hates it. He never has to make half-assed assumptions about anything. Anything except this.
Dazai hears a gunshot in the distance, breaking him out of his thoughts. Gunshots usually wouldn’t have any effect on him, but now all he can see in front of him is Odasaku dropping to the floor, and no matter how fast he runs, he can’t catch him. The light bouncing off the walls turned everything so yellow that even the blood pooling around them looked off. Everyone always says yellow represents happiness, but they’re wrong. How can a color that your eye (“Eyes”, he corrects himself) can’t detect on it’s own without help from other colors represent anything pure? But maybe he should rethink his disordered idea of what happiness is. No one said happiness was pure, some even saying it explicitly isn’t. But everyone else is always wrong. He can only trust himself (Okay, his trust in himself is, like, smaller than a grain of rice, but that’s still something. Still larger than what he has in everyone else). His idea of happiness is the only thing keeping him going. Because maybe if one day he can obtain it, obtain the purest of all chemicals, they’ll travel throughout his brain and cure it. But at this point he isn’t even sure if he’ll ever be able to obtain it in the first place.
Another gunshot, quieter this time. He hates the feeling of his throat closing up. Is this similar to what Odasaku felt as blood flooded into his windpipe and esophagus? He still has his gun, he could try and replicate it to find out… But the stinging in his right eye shatters the thought before it’s able to be fully processed. He remembers Odasaku’s dying wish to him (But he hadn’t forgotten, and he’ll never be able to forget. Even the most potent of drugs couldn’t make Dazai forget those last words of his). And then his throat is closing even further, and he didn’t think that was possible to do while still having air be able to pass through, but here he is.
Is (“Was”, he corrects himself again) Odasaku an idiot? He already called him such today to his face– his face that, as each second passed, became paler and turned more and more yellow. But Dazai really can’t wrap his head around it (Maybe if he still had the bandages Odasaku ripped off, he’d be able to?). Him, Dazai Osamu, be good? Save people? The only way he’s capable of saving people is with a bullet to their head. Or his head. That would also definitely save people. He’s called the demon prodigy for a reason. He’s feared by grown men twice his age in the mafia for a reason (He always found that funny, though. As a 16 year old, he was ordering around men in their 40s, and they’d listen to a fault. They should know not to listen to him if they aren’t currently on a mission and in a fight. Chuuya figured that out before he even joined the Mafia. Maybe that’s why he’s also such a high rank instead of them). He is a mafia executive for a reason. If he can’t even begin to understand an idea as simple as happiness, how could he ever save people in a moral way? He can’t understand the idea of good. It’s complex and much too intertwined with emotions and things he’s never felt or experienced. So how could he ever put it into practice if he can’t even begin to comprehend it?
But… Odasaku has never lied to him before (Unlike some individuals he used to call friends). He wouldn’t lie to him. He couldn’t lie to him. He is (“Was”. He pulls at his hair) Dazai’s friend, and Dazai was his friend. Even if the wish that Odasaku gave to him made the room even yellower, he knows it wasn’t a lie or something bad or any kind of manipulation tactic. Odasaku is (“WAS”) the most straightforward person he knew. He would tell it how it is, no beating around the bush. Sure, sometimes he was a bit… cryptic, but Dazai only saw that as a positive even if no one else did (Especially some individual. Honestly, he was an idiot to think he could understand someone like Odasaku and think Odasaku was anything like him. Odasaku is dead, and he’s alive. That fact should say enough). So if Odasaku’s wish is something the man believed in, believed that Dazai could achieve, then it must be possible.
To be good, though, would require leaving the mafia. Maybe Odasaku could be good in the mafia, but Dazai isn’t Odasaku. Odasaku is dead, and he’s alive. That fact should say enough. The thought of leaving the mafia makes his head spin. The thought of staying in the mafia also makes his head spin. There’s no way he can continue being there. But there’s also no way he can just leave. Where would he sleep for the coming months? How would he make an income? How would he be able to eat? How would he be able to stay sane?
Mori always makes sure to remind Dazai that he’d most likely be parapalegic and spending his days in a hospital room being fed the nastiest food to ever be cooked and begging to die even more than he currently does if Mori hadn’t found him at 14 (He actually told Dazai he would be dead at first, but after the first few reminders, Mori caught on to the small smile he’d receive from the 14 year old at that hypothetical. Who knew a suicidal teenager who went as far as attempting suicide would want to die? Apparently not Mori). The threat “and I can always make that your reality now if you wish” was left unsaid, but Dazai understood it loud and clear. He hates that man with a passion of an intensity he doesn’t think he’s ever experienced before. An intensity that could probably only be accurately compared to Corruption. He will die if he doesn’t keep the raging yellow fire in his chest in check, it consuming him from the inside out and flooding his windpipe and esophagus with black smoke, burnt flesh, and blood. Even so, he knows he’d be nothing without him. He knows the reminders Mori gives him aren’t lies nor exaggerations. He would be dead without him. He would be suffering even more without him. He doesn’t know who he’d be without Mori. Even if feeling just the vibrations of the sound waves from the man’s voice makes Dazai want to jump out of a window on the 18th floor of a 20 story building without first warning Chuuya about it to annoy him, he knows everything Mori has done has made him who he is– for better or for worse (Both. Better for Mori and the future he has envisioned for the Port Mafia and worse for literally everyone and everything else).
Dazai won’t make it three months without Mori. Not only because the man has spent the last four years bending Dazai’s arm back to ensure the underdevelopment of his independence and control (He lives in this shipping container because of Mori for a reason), but also because he knows Mori won’t come looking for him until he’s sure that Dazai has let his guard down just an inch. And even when he does try and look for him, he won’t be using force or unhinged aggression to bring him back. Mori has always been creepily good at getting anyone to do anything he wants them to do, all while the other person thinks that doing what Mori wants them to do was entirely their own plan to begin with. He’s good at being inhumanly cruel and then making the person he meticulously planned to hurt think they had forced his hand to do so.
Even Dazai himself had fallen for those tricks of his early on in their relationship as boss and protégé. It was only after jokingly complaining to Odasaku while at Lupin about Mori being so old and stringent and boring and the ultimate ruiner of all things fun and “Owie~, my back still hurts from last ni~ght!...” for Dazai to finally see what his boss was doing– the tricks he was constantly falling for when he thought of himself as Port Mafia’s resident court jester. When Odasaku asked if he knew the reason behind his back hurting, Dazai gave him the answer (Mori had sent someone to confiscate the futon from his already bare and deeply depressing room, so he had been forced to sleep on the ground of the container for a week until it finally reappeared. Fun fact: trying to sleep on hard metal hurts. That scenario hadn’t crossed his mind before, so he didn’t know this fun fact until that week, actually. The more you know!). As Odasaku asked for more stories Dazai had about Mori, the more clear it all became to him. When the light bulb over his head emitted that bright, blinding yellow, he had never felt stupider in his life. Who was he, Chuuya? How could he have so wrongly thought that everything Mori did was something right? In his defense, he did have a nasty habit of wanting everything that was considered wrong and resisting everything that was considered right. He didn’t want Mori to do those things, so that obviously meant they were the right things to do.
Dazai knows that Mori will try to drag him back to the Mafia if he makes an attempt at deflecting. Whether it’s in exactly 91 days or four years from now, it will happen. It’s not about if, it’s about when. Even if he finds a new job (Preferably one where he can save people and take in orphans). Even if in that new job he has a new partner that he can annoy and bring to their wits end everyday (Preferably one with a temper to match Chuuya’s). Even if his new boss at this hypothetical new job trusts him and has his back and tries to protect him (Preferably one who sees him as equal and human). Mori won’t let those things deter him from his goal. In fact, knowing the man, he’ll probably try to use those things against Dazai.
If he even manages to stay away that long. Dazai knows there’s a high probability of him having to pathetically crawl back to Mori after not even a month of trying to survive on his own. He’ll have to make up for the four years of begging he has been refusing to humor Mori with whenever he sends a thinly veiled threat Dazai’s way. He thinks he’d actually rather put a bullet through his throat than get on his knees for his boss’ forgiveness and compassion. Choking to death on his own blood flooding his windpipe and esophagus sounds less painful. It’d be easier for him and everyone around him if he were to just give himself a traumatic brain injury via blunt force trauma to his head (He could probably get Chuuya to do it for him) and forget this night ever happened. Forget he ever knew any man named Oda Sakunosuke. It’s useless to try and change who he is. He does believe that every human is capable of change to some extent. But, unfortunately for him, he’s not human.
So why even try to change? Why even try to escape?
He’s torn away from his thoughts once again by a noise outside. When he hears the chirps of birds, he almost thinks he must be hallucinating. Because there’s no way the sun is already rising. But after seven too many experiences with hallucinogenic drugs he didn’t bother to read the name of to identify their lethality before downing (He wasn’t taking them to die, really. He was just bored. But if he happened to die because they ended up being highly lethal, he wouldn’t have complained), he’s more or less figured out how to differentiate between hallucinations and reality. But auditory ones are definitely harder to be sure about. The visual ones are quite easy most of the time. When he sees a tiger-crab hybrid monstrosity approaching him as he melts into the floor, he can be pretty damn certain he’s hallucinating (That one hallucination he had of Chuuya in a dog onesie was pretty real looking, though. He’ll never forget the look on Chuuya’s face when Dazai gave it to him as a gift after having miraculously found that same onesie online).
His right eye twitches at the light that begins to shine through the cracks of his prison cell. And when he feels his chest swell up with unidentifiable emotions and his head flood with thoughts that are definitely not his, he’s certain he must have been drugged.
“You didn’t deserve any of that.”
“You don’t need him.”
“You deserve to live.”
“You’re still human.”
The outside light hits the dried blood on his hands, and the voice Dazai heard in his head that was slurring too much for him to be able to identify its owner sobers up.
“I didn’t deserve any of that.”
“I don’t need him.”
“I deserve to live.”
“I’m still human.”
He doesn’t understand why he suddenly stops shaking when it’s only gotten colder throughout the night. He doesn’t understand why the streaks of dried blood on his hands start itching. He doesn’t understand why he’s listening to someone he hates. Someone who he has kept locked up and has continually abused and neglected. Someone whose voice he doesn’t even recognize anymore.
Despite still not yet knowing what his future will hold from today onward and not yet knowing if he really wasn’t drugged somehow earlier in the night, he picks himself up off the ground of a shipping container and steps outside. He takes note of the way the dried flakes of blood covering his hands look as the light, a blended assortment of light blue and orange and yellow, hits them. Dazai doesn’t bother looking back as he walks away from his past and into his future. He doesn’t feel anything. He is happy.